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When a column in a consumer newspaper is headlined “Beware the menace of junk mail,” you know you're in for a regular ignoramus-o-rama.

That's just how a recent “Morning File” column by Peter Leo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette began. And it did not disappoint.

“You'd have thought that the Internet and all that fabulous stuff coming our way in spam would have put a dent in junk mail, but no such luck,” wrote Leo in the Jan. 4 column.

So let's get this straight: According to Leo, penis-enlargement spams, stock pump-and-dumps and Nigerian 419 e-mail scams should somehow have a limiting effect on direct marketers' mailing plans.

But wait, there's more.

“Some of the deluge no doubt is attributable to the success of the National Do Not Call Registry, which sent marketers scurrying from the phones to our mailboxes,” wrote Leo.

Scurrying. Catch the clever imagery? He's implying direct marketers are rats…or cockroaches. It apparently hasn't occurred to Leo that the newsstand and subscription prices of his newspaper barely cover printing costs, and so his livelihood depends on what he considers vermin.

Then, of course, Leo moves on to the inevitable anti-DM environmental arguments.

“The amount of junk mail sent each year in the USA is frightening — some 4 million tons, nearly half of which is never opened,” he wrote. “That means 100 million trees give their lives every year for junk mail,” he wrote, apparently with a straight face.

Give their lives? Please. They're trees, not baby seals. Nobody is clubbing them to death.

What's more, Leo works for a newspaper. What does he think it's printed on, solar panels?

It's one thing for an editorial staffer to avoid letting individual advertisers influence his coverage. It's quite another for him to be so pathetically unaware of the craft that keeps his publication in business, and allows him to pay his rent or mortgage and put food on his table.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could make Leo live in the world his anti-direct marketing beliefs would create?

For example, in the Land of Leo, the Post-Gazette would never take classifieds. After all, they're direct response advertising, and some are even placed by — gasp! — mail order marketers.

What's more, the Land of Leo's Post-Gazette would contain no advertising with calls to action, Web site addresses, phone numbers or coupons. The Land of Leo's Post-Gazette would have to pretty much eliminate Sunday freestanding inserts.

Also in the Land of Leo, the Post-Gazette's list would not be up for rent.

And best of all, the Land of Leo's Post-Gazette would have no circulation department.

As a result of all this, columnist Peter Leo would fall into an alcoholic tailspin and be reduced to chain smoking home-rolled cigarettes down to the nubs until his fingers turned yellow while feverishly scribbling incoherent arguments on scraps of paper in an urban, rat-infested, run-down, sooty one-room apartment with peeling lead paint on the walls and stacks of half-empty containers of rotting Chinese food littering the floor all because he would have nowhere to publish his work.

On second thought, the Land of Leo may not be such a bad place.